WOMAN STOWAWAY

Wairarapa Times-Age, 4 November 1938, Page 6

WOMAN STOWAWAY

THREE DAYS SPENT IN BUNKER. WANDERINGS IN EUROPE. A woman’s wanderings in Europe, and her final arrival in Landon after three days in a ship’s bunker without food, were described- at Old Street Court, London. A nominal fine of 10s was imposed on Rachel Rosenberg, 36, of Lordship Road, Stoke Newington, for having landed in the United Kingdom without leave of the immigration officer. In a statement to the police Rosenberg said that she believed she was born in Petrograd —now Leningrad. She was married when she was 15, and her husband, whose surname she had now forgotten, but whose Christian name was Lieb, was killed fighting against the Bolshevists. In 1928 she went to. Berlin, where she set up business as a dressmaker. On the advent of Hitler in 1933 she fled to Poland, and afterwards went to Antwerp. She remained there for two years, but without registering or doing any work. About a year ago she found that she had to leave there. She went, to the harbour with the intention of throwing herself into the sea, but a man asked her what she wanted to do, and said that for £lO. he would help her to get out of the country.

“He put me in a bunker where they put their things,” the statement continued. “There I remained for three days. I did not eat anything all the time, and only had a few drinks of water.

“On the third day, in the middle oi the night, a sailor came into the bunker and said to me, ‘The worst is over. You are safe now. You are in London.’ ”

The statement added that the sailor saw her ashore, and she was directed to the Jewish quarter. Answering Mr Alfred Kerstein for Rosenberg, a police officer said that she had lived here quite respectably and was in no sense an undesirable.

The magistrate, Mr Metcalfe, said that the woman had certainly had a hard life, and come through terrible privations. “I do not suppose that anybody in this country is anxious to hound a woman of this kind out of it,” he added. “I am going to make a recommendation for deportation, but the chances ■are that nothing will be done.”